failure

In this series of interviews with innovation thought leaders we reach out to innovators in marketing, design, strategy, and operations -- from start-ups, small-medium sized business, Fortune 500 companies, academia, to non-profits -- and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

In this installment, Willem Boijens, Senior User Experience Manager at Vodafone in Dusseldorf, Germany, takes on the questions. Willem has had a wide variety of roles at Vodafone and has seen the large wireless services company from many angles. In his current role he aims to make experiential design a catalyst for innovation, ensuring that customer needs … Read more

The Guardian is reporting that the United Kingdom government has flushed over ?2 billion (More than US$4 billion) since 2000 on failed IT projects. IT projects fail. It's a fact of life. It would be nice if the UK government weren't squandering so much with so few vendors, and if all the waste weren't locked up in proprietary software, and if it were mitigating its IT failure risk with open-source software.

Indeed, could there be a correlation to the UK government's fetish with Microsoft and seven other proprietary vendors? In other words, putting all of its IT eggs in just a few proprietary baskets doesn't seem to be working for the UK. Are the projects failing, in part, because the government is attempting to use proprietary, unwieldy software?

Or is it just a matter of incompetence? The Guardian writes:

The failure of the multimillion-pound police site marks the latest chapter in the government's litany of botched IT projects, with several costly schemes biting the dust. Blunders overseen by Downing Street have included the much-derided ?486m computer upgrade at the Child Support Agency (CSA), which collapsed and forced a ?1bn claims write-off, and an adult learning programme that was subjected to extensive fraud.… Read more

A year never goes by without someone inventing something hilariously useless. Many of these travesties tried to reinvent the wheel but were plagued by huge dollops of fail. And when companies get desperate, horrendous products hit the mass market and produce a true comedy of errors.

Over the next 10 pages, we'll take you on a guided tour of our picks of the bunch--not a definitive guide to technological idiocy. On each page is a piece of technology replete with oodles of fail. There's no excuse any more for wasting millions of dollars of development on products so … Read more

You would think the iPhone's touch screen--the hallmark of the whole dang thing--would last for more than five months. Well, think again.

After a particularly wet bike ride on Saturday here in the Bay Area, my iPhone got somewhat damp. (You know, the type of rain that soaks through a coat but doesn't ruin anything.) After the ride, I wanted to text people and noticed the top row of the text keyboard was not responding. I had to press, no squish, down to get a letter. And the cursor would flip out. And the screen looked bad when … Read more

Bolt.com, best known as a video sharing site that didn't really catch on, has filed for bankruptcy and shut down. The site had been in acquisition talks with GoFish, which would have been able to cover the $10 million settlement in a copyright infringement case with Universal Music. Earlier this month, the acquisition fell through, and Bolt was essentially doomed.

But it was really MySpace, not YouTube or copyright woes, that struck the first blow to Bolt. Before it shifted its focus to video, Bolt was a teen-oriented social networking site in the days when Facebook founder Mark … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A power outage hit downtown San Francisco Tuesday afternoon, leaving thousands of residents without power and knocking popular Web sites such as Craigslist, GameSpot, Yelp, Technorati, TypePad and Netflix offline for a few hours.

The power failure apparently hit 365 Main, a 227,000-square-foot data center in downtown San Francisco, particularly hard. The data colocation center's client list includes Craigslist and CNET Networks' GameSpot, a sister site of News.com.

It wasn't immediately clear if the other affected Web sites were customers of 365 Main or of other Web hosting companies, or whether the sites were blacked … Read more